Draft paper
Love’s Labour Lost? Emotional labour in engagement mentoring with disaffected young people
Helen Colley
the Manchester Metropolitan University
Paper presented in the Symposium:
Mentoring young people:
New insights and new issues for research, policy and practice
BERA Annual Conference, University of Leeds, 13 September 2001
Draft paper – please do not cite or quote without permission
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Draft paper
Love’s Labour Lost? Emotional labour in engagement mentoring with ‘disaffected’ young people
Helen Colley
the Manchester Metropolitan University
Abstract
This paper argues that a new form of mentoring has recently emerged in the US and UK. This model is driven by welfare-to-work policies, and seeks to re-engage disaffected young people with the labour market. Accordingly, it is termed ‘engagement mentoring’, and the paper defines its key characteristics. These include the parallel project of rendering both mentees and mentors more ‘employable’. Arguing that the practice of such mentoring is influenced by discourses of disaffection, it draws on a recently completed qualitative study into mentoring relationships between undergraduate student volunteers and young people on a vocational training scheme in England. A small number of individual case studies provide evidence of discourses mentors used to talk about disaffected youth, and reveal tensions that certain of these discourses produced for mentors themselves. The data reveals a process of emotional labour in which some female mentors worked to suppress their own painful feelings as they tried in vain to reform their mentees. These findings suggest that the power dynamics of engagement mentoring are more complex and covert than has hitherto been recognised, and include gender oppression through constructs of the mentors’ role as stereotypical female nurture.
Key words: mentoring; disaffection; emotional labour.
Introduction
Mentoring has become highly popular in recent years across a variety of contexts, ranging from the professional development of business managers, to initial teacher education, and support systems for young people in transition. Yet it is a practice that is under-researched and only weakly theorised (Philip, 2000, Roberts, 2000). In particular, it has received little in the way of critical analysis. Given that its rapid spread is something of a social phenomenon itself (Freedman, 1999), there have been calls for research to investigate the ‘political economy’ of mentoring (Gulam and Zulfiqar, 1998).
I have approached my research into mentoring from a socialist feminist perspective that seeks to uncover the class and gendered interests that underlie particular practices. In investigating mentoring relationships with ‘disaffected’ young people, I was concerned to build on one theme that has begun to emerge from a small number of more critical studies (e.g. DeMarco, 1993, Gay and Stephenson, 1998, Gulam and Zulfiqar, 1998, Millwater and Yarrow, 1997, Piper and Piper, 1999, 2000, Standing, 1999). Such studies highlight the issue of power dynamics within mentoring relationships, in particular by focusing on the power differential between mentor and mentee. Some call for the practice of mentoring to become more reciprocal, and a very small amount of research notes the harmful effects that may result if mentors abuse their superior power (e.g. Maguire, 2001, Scandura, 1998). My concern was to understand mentoring beyond the micro-level interactions within dyads, by locating dyads within their meso-level institutional context and the macro-level structural factors or historical context which also influence them. Rather than focusing exclusively on the superior power of mentors, I wanted to examine the degree to which both mentors and mentees might find mentoring empowering, or might find themselves subject to other forms of subordinating power. These questions were foregrounded by the fact that the mentees I studied were young people from poor working class backgrounds categorised as ‘disaffected’, and the mentors, university student volunteers, were in their large majority female. Later in this paper I will describe the research undertaken and methods used, and present relevant data from the mentors who took part. I will then apply to this data theoretical concepts drawn from the work of Hochschild and Bourdieu in order to provide a framework for understanding the power dynamics of these relationships. I continue now by arguing that the mentoring scheme I studied can be seen as an instance of a new model: engagement mentoring.
What is ‘engagement mentoring’?
Engagement mentoring is a term I have used to designate a particular form of mentoring for socially excluded youth that emerged in the US in the early 1990s, and in Britain in the latter half of that decade. I have given a fuller account elsewhere of this model of mentoring and the socio-economic context for its development (see Colley, 2001a). Examples include a range of projects funded by the European Youthstart Initiative (Employment Support Unit, 2000, Ford, 1999) and of local projects funded through the voluntary sector (e.g. Benioff, 1997, see also Skinner and Fleming, 1999, for a review of over 40 similar projects). Since the election of the Labour government in 1997, engagement mentoring has also become a central feature of initiatives addressing youth offending and health education, and of school-to-work transition systems such as the Learning Gateway, New Deal for Young People, and the new Connexions service. It is expected to ‘boost educational standards, ease social problems, and even reduce crime’ (Prescott and Black, 2000).
In brief, engagement mentoring has a number of defining characteristics. Firstly, its nature is planned and formalised within institutional contexts and agendas. This contrasts with the informal mentoring relationships that many young people seek out for themselves, in which agendas are negotiated without external third-party intrusion. Secondly, it is targeted at socially excluded young people, and its aim is to re-engage those young people with the labour market and structured routes thereto. The underpinning assumption is that paid employment is the prime condition for social integration, and legal or financial compulsion to participate is sometimes a factor. Thirdly, the role of mentors in this process is to transform young people’s attitudes, values, behaviours and beliefs so that they acquire ‘employability’. Employability itself is frequently defined as a requirement for young people to engage their personal commitment to the needs of employers and the economy (e.g. Industry in Education, 1996), although this requirement has been criticised as having ‘more to do with shaping subjectivity, deference and demeanour, that with skill development and citizenship’ (Gleeson, 1996: 97). There is, of course, nothing strikingly new in this concept of employability shaping various education and training frameworks as instrumental (cf. Bathmaker, 2001), but its influence upon the practice of mentoring has barely been questioned or investigated until now.
A fourth characteristic concerns the subjectivity and disposition of mentors themselves. A particular construct can be identified in a general discourse of mentoring. Mentors are expected to go ‘beyond the call of duty’ on behalf of their mentees, and they are often portrayed as saintly or god-like characters (Ford, 1999: 13, see also Megginson and Clutterbuck, 1995, Shea, 1992, Standing, 1999). In engagement mentoring, their role has been compared to that of a parent, exhibiting selfless devotion to the needs of the mentee. They must embody the ideal of both rational control and self-sacrificing care, in order to rectify the deficits or deviancies of their mentee and render them employable. Compounded by the fact that approximately 80% of professional and voluntary mentors for socially excluded young people are women, this is redolent of the gender stereotype of female nurture that is a central aspect of women’s oppression (for a fuller critique of this construction of mentors’ role, see Colley, 2001a, 2001b.) Furthermore, this is connected with a view that mentoring will also enhance the employability of those who act as mentors, whether they are already in employment (Skinner and Fleming, 1999), or whether they are students preparing to enter the graduate labour market themselves (Goodlad, 1995).
The nature of engagement mentoring indicates that there is a need for research which goes beyond the often under-resourced, short-term, and sometimes conformative nature of evaluation surveys (Stronach and Morris, 1994). Such surveys rely predominantly on quantitative methods aiming to measure outcomes for the mentee after a period of mentoring, and have been criticised for flaws such as reliance on self-reporting, bias in favour of mentoring, inconclusive findings and unsubstantiated claims (Merriam, 1983, Scandura, 1998). Many are also located within the discipline of psychology, resulting in an individualistic perspective that disembeds the practice of mentoring from its wider social, economic and political context (Colley, 2001a, Freedman, 1999). The qualitative research I conducted was an attempt to go beyond these limitations and contribute new knowledge by investigating the perceptions of a small number of mentors and mentees paired together in engagement mentoring. The research was undertaken at a scheme anonymised as ‘New Beginnings’. This scheme was run by a local Training and Enterprise Council (TEC) for 16-18 year-olds classed as ‘disaffected’, since they were not in structured education, training or employment. Funding had been obtained through the European Youthstart Initiative, and this required the scheme to focus on employment-related outcomes. It therefore combined mentoring with in-house basic and key skills training and work experience placements.
The volunteer mentors were undergraduates at the local university, mainly on teaching and applied social science degrees. New Beginnings was marketed to them partly as an opportunity to improve their own employability for the graduate labour market. It is worth noting that most of the volunteers aspired to careers in the caring professions. The use of in-depth semi-structured individual interviews with participants in established relationships, combined with a multi-level approach to understanding the individual, institutional and structural contexts of those relationships, provided new insights into the power dynamics of engagement mentoring. Elsewhere, I have discussed ways in which the young people exercised their own agency and resisted the imposition of employment-related goals within their mentoring relationships (Colley, 2000a, 2000b, 2001a). This paper focuses on the experiences of some of the mentors. In the following section, I go on to discuss the way in which mentors’ ‘mindset’ and therefore their practice (Millwater and Yarrow, 1998) may be influenced by various discourses of disaffection
Three discourses of disaffection
Watts (1999) suggests that there are three ways of interpreting social exclusion or disaffection. There is a moral interpretation, which constructs the disaffected as an ‘underclass’ whose deviant attitudes and behaviour pose a threat to the rest of society. This is perhaps best typified by the work of Charles Murray (1990), and Bagguley and Mann’s (1992) satirical characterisation of this view of the disaffected as ‘idle thieving bastards’. There is a structural interpretation, which focuses on the disaffected as passive victims of social and economic inequalities, and seeks to remedy their deficits. The policies of the current UK government to address social exclusion represent a combination of these two approaches (Colley and Hodkinson, 2001, Watts, 1999), which resonates with the typical aim of engagement mentoring to alter young people’s attitudes, values, behaviour and beliefs. Finally, there is an interpretation of disaffection as a form of cultural adaptation to social exclusion, and as a rational choice for some young people. While these choices can result in anti-social behaviour, there is a need to understand young people’s perspectives, and to recognise the constructive possibilities inherent in the survival tactics they adopt (see also Williamson and Middlemiss, 1999).
These discourses of disaffection have a material influence upon the practice of those seeking to help socially excluded young people (Watts, 1999). The moral interpretation poses a ‘missionary’ role for interventions, to rescue young people from deviance, with punitive sanctions for those who do not comply. The deficit model relies on the power of the helping practitioner (professional or volunteer) to remedy the lacks and needs of young people in line with the economic and social expectations of dominant groups such as employers. The discourse of disaffection as diversity and adaptation poses the need to acknowledge the validity of alternative lifestyles and forms of work outside the formal economy. I wanted to use this framework to analyse the way that the mentors at New Beginnings talked about the young people they were mentoring and about disaffection more generally, and to identify ways in which such discourse might affect the progress of their relationships, using a form of thematic discourse analysis (Morgan, 1999). (This analysis is reported more fully in Colley, in press.)
It is important to begin by noting the context in which the mentors were working. Firstly, New Labour’s social exclusion agenda, as noted above, constructs disaffection in terms of deviance and deficit, and sees social inclusion in narrow terms of labour market integration (Levitas, 1996). This approach is exemplified in major policy documents such as the Green Paper The Learning Age (DfEE, 1998) and the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) report Bridging the Gap (SEU, 1999). The media has also played its part historically in shaping social attitudes towards poor communities and disadvantaged youth, often demonising them (Cohen, 1980, Colley, in press). The notion of disaffection itself has been criticised as a ‘wicked issue’ and a ‘worse label’ that contributes to this climate (Piper and Piper, 1998).
Secondly, it is important to acknowledge that the mentors’ views were developed in the context of the design of New Beginnings and the input they received on the mentor training course they attended, developed by the university in partnership with the TEC. The way in which disaffected young people were characterised in this training was very much in the mould of the national policy approach, namely as a litany of deficits and deviance. The training pack they were given defined youth as ‘being in limbo between childhood and adulthood’, and young people as ‘liv[ing] for the day not for the future’. Young people likely to be referred to New Beginnings were repeatedly described as having little inclination to begin work or training; as rejecting social norms and expectations; and as fantasising or deliberately telling lies, engaging in criminal activities, abusing drugs and alcohol, and being victims of neglectful or abusive families. Some of the mentors later commented on the climate of fear this generated among the volunteers.
The key task posed for the mentors was to promote the young person’s participation in the vocational training provided by New Beginnings. This was largely determined by the employment-related outcomes required by the Youthstart funding régime, and reinforced by the TEC’s need to respond to a shortage of available workers for the low-skilled end of the local labour market. A weekly action plan provided by TEC staff for each young person, with goals and targets for their training and work experience, was supposed to form the focus of mentoring discussions. This role was emphasised in each section of the mentor training pack. Mentors were told to present a cheerful and optimistic demeanour at all times in promoting the scheme’s goals: